1

Worldview, Sphere Sovereignty, and Desiring the Kingdom:

A Guide for (Perplexed) Reformed Folk

James K.A. Smith, Calvin College

5 November 2010 | ARIHE Symposium | Redeemer University College

Introduction: FAQs about DTK

Somehow I never learned how to lay prostrate before sacred cows. It’s not that I lack idolatrous

inclinations; it’s just that I regularly underestimate the sacred nature of prevailing bovine statues

in the neighborhood. It’s not that I’m an eager iconoclast; it’s just that I’m enough of a

newcomer to various conversations that I don’t always appreciate the sacrosanct status of “our”

concepts.

For example, I quickly learned that if you write a book on Christian education and

offhandedly (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) suggest even a temporary “moratorium” on the

notion of “worldview,” you can expect some animated responses and festering suspicion.1 The

villagers begin to get restless, so to speak, even if you thought you were a citizen of the village.

This has characterized some of the response to Desiring the Kingdom in Reformed quarters of

Christian higher education. So I’m very grateful to Syd Hielema and ARIHE for the opportunity

to address some of those concerns by providing something of a guide to the argument of DTK

for Reformed folk who might be perplexed by some of my claims and proposals. In the process,

I hope I can reestablish that I’m one of “us,” and even that the core of my argument is

unapologetically Reformed.

To do so, let me very briefly rehearse the argument of DTK. It begins from a sort of

working axiom that every pedagogy assumes an anthropology: that is, every approach to

education assumes some model of the human person, even if this anthropology is never made

1
See James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand
Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), p. 65. Henceforth abbreviated as DTK.
 2

explicit. Thus our understanding of the nature and goal of education is shaped by what we think

human beings are. So if you (implicitly) think that human beings are essentially thinking

things—containers for ideas, beliefs, and propositions—then you will end up conceiving of

education as a primarily informative project: the dissemination of ideas and beliefs into mind-

receptacles. And I argue that much of the rhetoric about “worldview” in Christian higher

education falls into this camp: it tends to think about the nature and task of Christian education

as the dissemination of certain content, or the provision of a Christian “perspective” on how to

think about the world.

The argument of DTK is not that this is wrong but only that it is inadequate, and this

inadequacy stems from the stunted anthropology that is assumed. Or, to put this in terms I first

learned from the Reformational tradition, such a picture of education is insufficiently radical

because it doesn’t get to the root of our identity. By focusing on the cognitive and intellectual,

such a model of the person—and its corresponding picture of education—undervalues and

underestimates the importance of the affective; by focusing on what we think and believe, such a

model misses the centrality and primacy of what we love; by focusing on education as the

dissemination of information, we have missed the ways in which Christian education is really a

project of formation. In other words, at the heart of DTK’s argument is an antireductionism and

the affirmation of a more holistic understanding of human persons and Christian education. And

such antireductionism and holism I learned at the feet of Herman Dooyeweerd and Cal Seerveld.

Thus I make three intertwined proposals in the book, all indebted to Saint Augustine, that

patron saint of the Reformers: first, I sketch an alternative anthropology that emphasizes the

primacy of love and the priority of the imagination in shaping our identity and governing our
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orientation to the world2; second, I emphasize the education is also about the formation

(“aiming”) of our love and desire, and that such formation happens through embodied,

communal rituals we might call “liturgies”—including a range of “secular” liturgies that are

pedgagogies of desire; third, given the formative priority of liturgical practices, I argue that the

task of Christian education needs to be resituated within the ecclesial practices of Christian

worship and liturgical formation. In other words, I argue that we need to reconnect worship and

worldview, church and college.

As I should have guessed, this nexus of proposals set off alarms for those within a

Reformed (especially Kuyperian) orbit. Let me try to formulate these as the FAQs often directed

to DTK, and then extend the conversation by trying to answer these questions here.

1) Is this really Reformed? How could a proposal that is critical of the notion of
“worldview” be Reformed? And isn’t the “worldview” that’s being rejected here really
only a caricature?
2) Isn’t this just a new fangled version of old, fundamentalist anti-intellectualism? Isn’t this
just Jamie returning to his emotivist Pentecostal heritage? Doesn’t this model give
comfort to those who would denigrate the life of the mind and the importance of critical
Christian reflection? Isn’t DTK just retreating to the status quo that generated the so-
called scandal of the evangelical mind?
3) Aren’t we in danger of blurring important boundaries between the church and the
college? In other words, doesn’t this proposal violate the sovereignty of the spheres—
making the school into the church? Don’t we need some border patrol here?

These are all very fair concerns. They get to the heart of whether the sort of college envisioned

in DTK is really “Reformed.” I’m grateful for the opportunity to address these three sets of

concerns as a way of trying to establish the Reformed pedigree of the “ecclesial college”

sketched at the end of DTK.

I. Whose Worldview? Which Calvinism?

2
In volume 2 I will discuss this in terms of a “philosophy of action.”
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Does DTK pull the rug out from under the very project of Reformed higher education by

rejecting the notion of worldview? A very simple answer is: No. A more complex, nuanced

answer is: Kinda maybe sorta. Let me explain.

A. Two Cheers for Worldview

To be very clear, nowhere in DTK do I reject the notion of worldview. Indeed, if I can offer a bit

of personal testimony, the truth is that, for me, the discovery of “worldview thinking” was

revolutionary. I’m a whole-hearted worldview convert, as it were. Having been converted to

Christian faith through a very dualistic, anti-intellectual tradition (the Plymouth Brethren), I

found the “world-affirming” ethos of the Reformed tradition to be both liberating and

illuminating. The holism of this “worldview” paradigm has informed every aspect of my work;

yea, it’s precisely why I answered the call to become a Christian scholar. It’s also why, now,

when I face students who have been hearing about the Reformed “worldview” of “creation-Fall-

redemption” since kindergarten (having been blessed with a lifetime of Christian education in the

Reformed tradition where these matters are taken for granted), I’m not sure whether to yell or cry

when I see their jaded eyes glaze over. I do somersaults to try to get them to (re)appreciate the

genius and wisdom embedded in “worldview” thinking which, in my experience, broke open the

world for me.

So I have to confess that I find it odd when readers conclude that DTK rejects the notion

of worldview. It certainly offers a critique of where this model has gone, but it does not amount

to a “rejection” of worldview—even if I do counsel a (temporary) “moratorium” on the term.

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Indeed, on the opening page of the book (on the first page of the Preface) I note that, though my

project is to “push down through worldview to worship as the matrix from which a Christian

worldview is born,” “[t]his doesn’t require rejecting worldview-talk, only situating it in relation

to Christian practices” (p. 11).3 In fact, in the next sentence I offer Desiring the Kingdom as a

“companion volume” to classic worldview texts such as Walsh and Middleton’s Transforming

Vision, Wolters’ Creation Regained, and Neal Plantinga’s Engaging God’s World.4

All that is simply to emphasize that, rather than being a “sustained attack” on worldview,

Desiring the Kingdom offers two cheers for this paradigm. Indeed, the whole project assumes

the worldview paradigm in order to refine and recalibrate it.

B. On the Inadequacies of Worldview: Or, Reading Wendell Berry in Costco

So where does this perception come from? What is it about DTK that makes people worried that

I’m abandoning the importance of worldview for Christian higher education? On the one hand, I

spend some time noting that the model of “worldview” I’m rejecting is a kind of mutated version

that has emerged precisely when worldview-talk went evangelical, so to speak, unhooked from

the creation-affirming holism of the Reformed tradition (pp. 31-32). My concern is that just

when it seems like everybody is adopting a “worldview” approach, what we get in the name of

“worldview” is a stunted step-brother of the holistic “complex” Abraham Kuyper spoke of when

discussing the Calvinist “world- and life-view.”5

3
I make the same point a few pages into the Introduction when I note that “I don’t want to entirely
abandon” worldview-talk (p. 24).
4
I also explicitly affirm the helpfulness of “worldview” in my new book, Letters to a Young Calvinist: An
Invitation to the Reformed Tradition (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010).
5
For my positive articulation of this project, see James K.A. Smith, Letters to a Young Calvinist: An
Invitation to the Reformed Tradition (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010).
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On the other hand, I think there remain legitimate concerns with even the best rendition

of “worldview” approaches insofar as they tend to still conceive the task of Christian education

as the dissemination of a perspective, a way to see the world. My criticism here is not that this is

wrong but only that it is inadequate. It is an approach that imagines us (and our students) as

primarily spectators of the world rather than as actors in the world. But if one of the goals of

Christian education is to form what Neal Plantinga describes as “prime citizens of the kingdom,”

then we need to appreciate that we act as citizens, not primarily on the basis of cognitive

deliberation, or even on the basis of our “perspectives,” but for the most part on the basis of

acquired habits, unconscious desires, and pre-intellectual dispositions. And so our education has

to be attuned to how those desires and dispositions are formed. We might have a highly

developed, articulate “worldview” and yet act in ways that are remarkably inconsistent with such

a “perspective.”

Let me try to make sense of this with an example: over the past several years, through the

steady evangelism of my wife, Deanna, I have become more and more convinced about the

injustice of our dominant systems of food production and consumption. Through the influence

of people like Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, and especially Wendell Berry, I have become

intellectually convinced that they offer the best perspective for thinking about these issues.

Indeed, in many ways I’ve owned their perspective as my own.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the grocery store: I discovered a significant

gap between my thought and my action. This hit home to me one day while I was immersed in

reading Wendell Berry’s delightful anthology, Bringing It to the Table. As I paused to reflect on

a key point, and thus briefly took my nose out of the book, I was suddenly struck by an ugly

irony: here I was reading Wendell Berry in the food court at Costco. There are so many things
 7

wrong with that sentence I don’t even know where to begin: indeed, “the food court at Costco”

might be a kind of shorthand for Berry’s picture of the sixth circle of hell.

So how might one account for this gap between my thought and my action—between my

passionate intellectual assent to these ideas and my status quo action? Well, this is exactly the

intuition at the heart of DTK: While Pollan and Berry may have successfully recruited my

intellect, they have not been successful in converting my habits. Nor could they be, for so much

of my action and orientation to the world is governed by dispositions which are shaped by

practice.

Implicit in the anthropology of Desiring the Kingdom is a philosophy of action—a tacit

assumption about what drives or causes human behavior and action which is germane to the goal

and task of Christian education. DTK’s account of the formative power of both “secular

liturgies” and intentional Christian worship has a certain urgency precisely because it assumes

that so much of our orientation to—and action in—the world is governed by preconcious habits

and patterns of behavior, and those habits are formed by environments of practice. This stands in

contrast to what Charles Taylor calls “intellectualist”6 or “decisionist” models which tend to

overestimate “thinking” as the cause of action. This does not entail a crass determinism; nor

does it exclude a role for reflective, deliberative, conscious “choice.” However, such a model—

shored up by recent research in cognitive science—does relativize the role of ratiocinative

deliberation in action. More positively, it highlights the significant impact of environment (and

attendant practices) in shaping our “adaptive unconscious,” which then steers/drives action at a

preconscious level. As such, we should be increasingly attentive to the formative role of

environment and practice in shaping our desires.

6
On such accounts, our action is thought to be the outcome of conscious, mental deliberation—the
outcome of thinking about it.
 8

The response to such a situation is not simply pressing people to think more about what

they’re doing. Consider another example from eating and practices associated with food. In his

book Mindless Eating, Cornell nutritionist Brian Wansink accounts for the American obesity

epidemic in terms of the habits and practices which unconsciously shape our tastes and eating

patterns.7 We are trained to orient ourselves to food and food systems by practices and

environments which shape our orientation at a preconscious level—and then we regularly act on

the basis of those malformed desires. We eat “mindlessly.” However, what’s most significant is

Wansink’s antidote to this problem: it is not a matter of mindful eating. Drawing on extensive

psychological research, Wansink demonstrates that we simply are not the sorts of animals who

can be deliberatively “on” all the time. So the proper response to unhealthy mindless eating is

not mindful eating but rather healthy mindless eating, changing environments and practices in

order to form different (unconscious) habits.

A “worldview approach” would assume that the proper response to mindless eating is

mindful eating. Similarly, an “intellectualist” model of education would assume that the proper

response to the unconscious formation of “secular liturgies” would be “critical reflection,”

thinking about it more, thinking about what we’re doing. Of course such reflection and thinking

is important and crucial; and the articulation of a Christian worldview is helpful—but as I’ve

already pointed out, you can read Wendell Berry in Costco. The argument of Desiring the

Kingdom is not that we need less than worldview, but more: that Christian education will only be

fully an education to the extent that it is also a formation of our habits. And such formation

happens not only, or even primarily, by equipping the intellect but through the repetitive

formation of embodied, communal practices. And as I suggest in DTK, the “core” practices in

this respect are specifically the practices of Christian worship. But before turning to a
7
Brian Wansink, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (New York: Bantam, 2007).
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consideration of the role of worship in Christian education, let me address a second concern: that

DTK encourages a retreat back into anti-intellectual pietism.

II. A Hearts and Minds Strategy: On Anti-intellectualism

Granted, in DTK I basically argue that discussions of Christian higher education

overestimate the importance of thinking. This is generally not a good strategy for trying to win

friends and influence people when the people involved consider themselves thinkers.

Furthermore, many of those toiling in the not-so-ivory halls of Christian colleges and universities

would be quite surprised to hear that thinking is being overvalued in North American

Christianity. Indeed, quite the opposite seems to be true: evangelical piety tends to intensify a

general anti-intellectual malaise that besets our culture. The response to such a situation would

be to encourage more thinking, not less—to emphasize the importance of the mind, not fall back

into the soppy mushiness of “the heart” and its affections. In short, with its critique of

“rationalist” or “intellectualist” models of the human person, it would seem that DTK plays right

into the hands of the forces of anti-intellectualism.8

Indeed, some seem to worry that, on my model, we’d just spend all day in chapel or that

the Christian college would just be a glorified Sunday School. But such worries stem from a

8
In this context, it’s odd to be charged with some kind of anti-intellectualism, not only because I explicitly
reject this on the first page of the book (p. 17n.2), but also because the book itself is not exactly a walk in the park.
The entire argument of the book is a pretty rigorous engagement with a whole host of ideas, inviting the reader to
think through complex theories from the likes of Heidegger, Augustine, Taylor and Bourdieu, all in order to
articulate a unique, integral Christian “perspective” on education. If this reading of Desiring the Kingdom was
correct, you’d wonder why I’d ever spend time on such a venture. Perhaps that’s a clue that this is not the best way
to read the book.
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misunderstanding of my emphasis on worship with respect to worldview9; in particular, such a

worry seems to read my claim that worship is a necessary and important condition for integral

Christian education as if I were saying this was a sufficient condition for Christian education.

But I’m not suggesting we raze the physics labs and expand the chapel. I’m not suggesting we

demolish the literature classroom and all just stay in church all week. Nor do I anywhere suggest

that a Christian university is not about the business of ideas! Of course it is; the issue is whether

it is just trafficking in ideas. It’s the latter that I’m rejecting.

However, let me honor this worry about anti-intellectualism by pointing out two things in

response:

First, I will concede that, on the basis of a hasty and selective reading, the argument of

Desiring the Kingdom could “fall into the wrong hands,” so to speak. (WMD!) That is, a

superficial reading of the project might misunderstand it as giving comfort to just the sort of anti-

intellectualism that Reformed evangelical scholars have been working to undo. While I don’t

think a close reading of the argument bears this out, I think I understand how this happened:

quite simply, I inhabit a stream of the Christian tradition where devotion to the life of the mind

has deep roots. And such a commitment to the “life of the mind” was so assumed in my

argument that I could criticize a certain “rationalist” overemphasis without ever worrying that

this would give license to abandoning critical thinking.10

Second, let me just emphasize that my goal is not to denigrate the intellect but to situate

theoretical reflection within the wider purview of our fundamental pre-theoretical orientation to

9
I grant that I’m making strong claims about primacy that might almost give the impression of a
dichotomous relationship between worship and worldview; but I don’t think I ever actually make the relation
dichotomous, precisely for reasons I’ve already cited.
10
As I note in the Preface, I sort of imagined Desiring the Kingdom as a companion volume to books like
Cornelius Plantinga’s Engaging God’s World which clearly articulates the importance for Christian academic
reflection on God’s world.
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the world.11 From this some too hastily conclude that relativizing the intellectual is somehow a

rejection of the intellectual, but that clearly doesn’t follow. DTK is pressing us to consider the

significance of our non- and pre-intellectual orientation of the world; to appreciate all of the

ways in which this shapes and governs our being in the world; and to therefore expand what we

consider as falling within the purview of education. To situate (and relativize) the intellect is not

anti-intellectual; it is emphasizing that even rationality needs to be faithful, needs to be

disciplined and trained. And this seems to be a deeply biblical sensibility. Indeed, Paul’s prayer

for the Christians in Philippi could easily be the epigraph of DTK:

9And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real
knowledge and all discernment, 10so that you may determine what really
matters… (Phi. 1:9-10, NASB, revised)

Our knowledge and discernment is guided and shaped by our loves. And love takes practice.

This is why I emphasized the implication of all of this: education operates on this pre-

theoretical register whether we recognize it or not. Pedagogies of desire form our habits,

affections, and imaginations, thus shaping and priming our very orientation to the world. So if a

Christian education is going to be holistic and formative, it needs to attend to much more than

the intellect—which is why I emphasize that there is a unique “understanding” that is “carried”

in Christian practices, particularly the practices of Christian worship. It is in such practices that

our love is “trained,” disciplined, shaped and formed. And it is, to some extent, only in such

practices that this can happen. Attention to intellect is insufficient precisely because there is an

irreducible, unique “understanding” that is only carried in practices.12

11
In this respect, my argument is very much indebted to Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacInytre’s
Dependent, Rational Animals.
12
[See Merleau-Ponty on “praktognosia”]
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Let me try to make sense of this with an analogy between literature and liturgy, drawing

on the work of Merleau-Ponty.13 Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology provide the framework to

more carefully articulate the core claim of DTK: that love is its own kind of knowing, operative

on a “pre-theoretical” register. For Merleau-Ponty, this requires taking our embodiment more

seriously, charting a space between “intellect” and instinct, between reflection and reflex. As he

poetically puts it, “my body is the pivot of the world.”14 What he’s describing—and what I was

trying to describe in Desiring the Kingdom—is a kind of “preconscious knowledge” which is

“not of the kind: ‘I think that…’”15

Merleau-Ponty describes this as “motor intentionality,”16 a kind of bodily knowledge that

cannot be articulated in propositional form. Our actions and movement, then, are not

“handmaidens of consciousness” as if the outcome of deliberative representation; to the contrary,

“[c]onsciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body. A movement

is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its ‘world,’

and to move one’s body is to aim at things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their

call.”17 He names this “praktognosia”—an irreducible know-how that gets into our bones: “Our

bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us with a way

of access to the world and the object, with a ‘praktognosia,’ which has to be recognized as

13
Working out some of what follows will be a central focus of How Worship Works, the sequel to DTK.
14
“The body is a vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved
in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them.” Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routlege, 2002), p. 94.
15
Ibid., pp. 93, 94. Merleau-Ponty invokes a moving example: “We do not understand the absence or death
of a friend until the time comes when we expect a reply from him and when we realize that we shall never again
receive one” (p. 93). This sort of “understanding” is often most powerfully expressed in literature or art (consider,
in this case, Patty Griffin’s song, “Goodbye”).
16
Ibid., pp. 158-159.
17
Ibid., pp. 159-161.
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original and perhaps as primary.”18 Thus Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment and

“motor intentionality” provides resources to understand the mechanics of liturgical formation,

which is also bodily—another kind of “training” or “praktognosia.”

Furthermore, his phenomenological framework can also help understand the function of

narrative, story, and literature.19 For example, in considering the case study of “Schneider”—

whose brain injury has eliminated his praktognosia and requires him to think through

everything—Merleau-Ponty notes that because of this, Schneider is unable to understand stories.

“[I]ndeed if a story is told to the patient, it is observed that instead of grasping it as a melodic

whole with down and up beats, with its characteristic rhythm or flow, he remembers it only as a

succession of facts to be noted one by one.”20 This is because there is a kind of knowledge

“carried” in stories which cannot be processed didactically, cannot be paraphrased.21 Elucidate

“heresy of paraphrase” here.

III. Church, College, and Sphere Sovereignty: Re-reading Kuyper

So DTK argues that a holistic, formative Christian education will not only equip students with a

Christian perspective; it must also form students through Christian practice—for only practiced

formation will adequately capture our imaginations and convert our habits such that our
18
Ibid., p. 162. It’s important to note that Merleau-Ponty significantly influenced Charles Taylor, who
played a central role in the argument of Desiring the Kingdom.
19
Indeed, this is a central analogy for Merleau-Ponty when he addressed the irreducibility of praktognosia,
resisting the twin reductionisms of intellectualism and empricism, citing Scheler: “Just as all literary works…are
only particular cases of the possible permutations of the sounds which make up language and of their literal signs, so
qualities or sensations represent the elements from which the great poetry of our world (Umwelt) is made up. But
just as surely as someone knowing only sounds and letters would have no understanding of literature, and would
miss not only its ultimate nature but everything about it, so the world is not given and things are not accessible to
those for whom ‘sensations’ are the given” (ibid., p. 374).
20
Ibid., p. 153. [cp. Dreyfus on the limits of AI vis-à-vis stories.]
21
This raises crucial questions about form that will be addressed in detail by drawing an analogy between
the irreducibility of form in poetry and liturgy (addressed under the rubric of “the heresy of paraphrase”; see
Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 174-175).
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orientation and action in the world is aimed at the shalom God desires for his creation.22 This

means that Christian colleges and universities must not only be informed by a Christian

worldview; they must also be nourished by Christian worship, for it is the historic, intentional,

communal practices of Christian worship which “carry” a formative, liturgical “understanding”

of God’s redemptive good news.23 And this “know-how”—this praktognosia—cannot be

paraphrased; it cannot be adequately translated into the portability of propositions. It can only be

absorbed through practice.

On this account, Christian worship (and other related Christian practices24) is not only

beneficial to the task of Christian education, it is essential. Through the practices of Christian

worship we acquire a tacit know-how that shapes our action, including our theoretical activity.

These practices are meant to form us as a people who desire the Kingdom and who embody a

foretaste of that coming kingdom. Before we ever articulate a Christian worldview, we absorb a

visceral understanding of God’s kingdom in the practice of Christian worship. If we believe in

order to understand, you might say we worship in order to worldview.

It is this part of my argument that raises the final cluster of concerns for Reformed folk:

doesn’t this sound like I’m collapsing the church as “organism” into the church as “institute?”

Doesn’t this blur the boundaries between church and school, between these sovereign spheres?

This all starts to sound a bit, well, “Catholic.”

Let me address this concern from a couple of angles:

22
I should perhaps explicitly clarify that I don’t think only educational institutions will do this. In a way, I
am suggesting that all Christian institutions will only be holistically Christian to the extent that they are both
informed by a Christian worldview and formed by Christian practices.
23
See DTK, chapter 5.
24
See Bass & Dykstra, etc. For discussion, Smith & Smith, “Introduction” to Teaching, Learning, and
Christian Practices [Eerdmans, forthcoming].
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First, I’ll confess that I am quite intentionally countering a certain kind of Kuyperianism;

But that might not be the same as countering Kuyper. Kuyper has been inherited in different

ways in North America, yielding different Kuyperianisms. While Zwaanstra suggests

“ecclesiology was the core of [Kuyper’s] theology” (p. 150), one quickly notes that it is the

church as organism that is the “heart” of his doctrine. This, coupled with some other emphases

in Kuyper, led to a strain of Kuyperianism that actually had little place for the church as institute

in its understanding of Christian engagement with culture. Indeed, there have even been strains

of Kuyperianism that have been quite anti-ecclesial. On the other hand, Kuyper himself clearly

saw a crucial role for the church as institute and devoted a great deal of his time, energy, and

gifts to its welfare and reform.25 This signals that there might be a different way to inherit

Kuyper on this score. This invites us to re-read Kuyper with new eyes, and I’d like to briefly

offer such a re-reading here.

Let’s take, as an example, his classic statement of sphere sovereignty and the

institute/organism distinction in “Common Grace.”26 In order to get to the heart of the matter,

permit me a brief detour into his argument. We should first appreciate that he’s doing battle on

two fronts: on the one hand, he is opposing the model of a “national church” (which was then

still a sort of live option in the Netherlands); on the other hand, he is battling “sectarianism”

which is the ecclesiological outworking of the pietism he has already criticized. Let’s pick this

up in his critique of the national church.

Note first where Kuyper says that he agrees with the national church ‘party’: “[W]e and

they agree that Christ’s church and its means of grace cover a broader field than that of special

grace alone” (189). In other words, they both agree that the church—and as the body of Christ—

25
[See new book, Kuyper, Our Worship, for sampling.]
26
REF in Centennial Reader.
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is called to have an impact beyond merely “spiritual” matters. The body of Christ is to be the

agent by which the “significance” of Christ for “nature” is made manifest. “We both

acknowledge that the church does two things: (1) it works directly for the well-being of the elect,

lures them to conversion, comforts, edifies, unites, and sanctifies them; but (2) it works indirectly

for the well-being of the whole of civil society, constraining it to civic virtue” (189-190). So the

church is called to have a “leavening” effect on society, impacting all the spheres of human

cultural production.

With that agreement in mind, we can appreciate the difference, viz., they differ “in how

to reach that good goal.” The disagreement, in other words, is about strategy. The national

church party thinks that the way to have this impact is to “include civil society in the church”

(190). Kuyper, in contrast, emphasizes that the church as institute should be a “city on a hill

amid civil society” (190) and from which the church as organism infiltrates and leavens civil

society. As he’ll later put it, “[t]his institute does not cover everything that is Christian. Though

the lamp of the Christian religion only burns within that institute’s walls, its light shines out

through its windows to areas far beyond, illumining all the sectors and associations that appear

across the wide range of human life and activity” (194). Thus he suggests that we picture these

as concentric circles, with the church as institute—administering the sacraments, exercising

discipline, forming disciples—nourishing a vibrant core of believers who, as an organism,

infiltrate and leaven civil society (194-195).27

27
Kuyper, in a mode of Protestant flourish, actually claims that the church as organism precedes the church
as institute—and could even “manifest itself” where the church as institute has ceased to function (195).
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With this model in mind, we can see Kuyper’s critique of both the national church and

sectarianism. Because the national church model “recognizes only one circle,”28 so to speak

(194)—because it can only imagine the church as institute and thus only concerned with personal

salvation—it thereby dilutes the vibrant core that is needed to be leavening. In other words, by

baptizing everyone, the national church admits into the church a host of non-confessors and

unbelievers, and by failing to exercise church discipline, it loses any purifying or sanctifying

animus with which to impact society. By effectively taking “the world” (=civil society, 194) into

the church, the church just becomes worldly (196). It lacks any Christ-disciplined center from

which to be a means of making Christ “significant” for the rest of society.29

However, if the national church goes wrong by losing its center, so to speak, sectarianism

goes wrong by retreating into and fortifying itself within a pure “center” and thereby neglecting

responsibility for “nature.” “Sects,” for Kuyper, are those configurations (or rather,

disfigurations) of Christianity which effectively put themselves “outside the context of human

life” (191). A sect is “a tiny holy circle that has remained on earth by mistake and really has

nothing to do with the life that is lived down here” (191). Sectarians are also critics of the

national church, but they criticize not only the strategy but also the goal; on their account, the

Gospel is not concerned with the institutions and practices of civil society. Politics, economics,

the arts and education are “worldly” matters not of their concern. In short, sectarianism rejects

28
This seems to be why Kuyperians construe “Catholic” models (of, say, Cavanaugh or MacIntyre) as
variations on this “national church” model. But the national church model seems uniquely Protestant (not to say that
obviously there are older Catholic correlates of this). Needs to discussion and refinement. See Bolt on MacIntyre?
29
Kuyper also generates a theological account for a principled pluralism in this context: “what we want is a
strong confessional church but not a confessional civil society nor a confessional state” (197). Thus he advocates a
certain kind of “secularization of state and society”—one that makes space for confessional pluralism in the state
and civil society—as “one of the most basic ideas of Calvinism” (197). (This should be distinguished from an
aggressive secularism that would seek to “nullify the church’s influence on civil society” [196].)
 18

what God affirms as good, viz. creation in all its facets; thus it also rejects any notion of common

grace.30 Or, in the language Kuyper has used earlier, sectarians reject “nature.”

Now, what does this have to do with our concern—specifically, the relationship between

the church and college, worship and worldview? Well, what’s at stake here is not only how we

make the distinction between the two, but how we understand the relation between the two. So

while Kuyper certainly emphasizes that “the institute does not cover everything that is Christian”

(194), he goes on to note, recalling the concentric circle metaphor: “Aside from this first circle of

the institute and in necessary connection with it, we thus recognize another circle whose

circumference is determined by the length of the ray that shines out from the church institute

over the life of people and nation” (195). It seems to me that it is precisely Kuyper’s claim that

there is a necessary connection between institute and organism that has been lost in certain

strains of Kuyperianism. And why does Kuyper propose a necessary connection between the

two? Precisely because it is the worship of the church as institute which forms those who will be

the rays of light in civil society.

The model I propose in DTK does not collapse the distinction between institute and

organism, but it does aim to (re)connect them in just the “necessary” way Kuyper emphasized.

Conclusion: Remember We Are Catholic

That said, the question isn’t whether my argument is Kuyperian. My goal has been to

demonstrate that it is Reformed. But in demonstrating that, I don’t mean to argue that it is not

30
Kuyper’s argument is a tad circular here: he chastises the sectarians for refusing to recognize common
grace and therefore refusing to affirm the goodness of civil society (192). We also need to (later) distinguish
pietistic sectarianism from antithetical critique.
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“Catholic.” That is a charge I will happily, even eagerly accept, for I think Reformed folk could

do nothing better than remember we are Catholic.31 The Protestant Reformation is an

Augustinian renewal movement in the church catholic, not a philosophical project spawned in

the early 20th century. The unique educational vision of the Reformed tradition will only be

enhanced and deepened through a more intentional appropriation of the accrued wisdom of our

Catholic heritage—a wisdom that is “carried,” first and foremost, in the shape of Christian

worship. If we hope to “worldview” well, we must learn to worship well.

31
In some ways, Kuyper was more Protestant than the Reformers! Consider his critique of Calvin as being
“too Catholic” (p. 153). One could say that Kuyper over-emphasizes the role of worship as “expression” and misses
the aspect of “formation.” As a result, he tends to see the church as a voluntary gathering of individual believers
rather than an institutional site of the sacraments and means of grace (153-154). In short, one finds quite a modern
individualism in Kuyper.